Some 5,000 campesinos, students and activists marched in the eastern Salvadoran port city of La Union on July 15 to protest plans to build two electric plants near the Conchagua Volcano. The Virginia-based AES Corporation, which controls most of the electric power distribution in El Salvador, plans to build a coal-burning plant, while Houston-based Cutuco Energy Central America wants to build a plant using natural gas.

At least one million people—more than two million, according to some sources—marched in El Alto, Bolivia, on July 20 to call for national unity and to oppose proposals to move the executive and legislative branches of government from La Paz, the de facto capital, to the southern city of Sucre. Although no government officials spoke at the demonstration, in the evening President Evo Morales called the mobilization "historic"; analysts considered it the country's largest demonstration in recent years. The media nicknamed it the "Pacenazo" (from La Paz), while participants called it a cabildo (a public discussion, like a town hall meeting).

Global warming is drying up mountain lakes and wetlands in the Andes and threatening water supplies to such major cities as La Paz, Quito and Bogota, World Bank research reveals. The risk is especially great to the high-Andes wetlands known as páramo, which supplies 80 percent of the water to Bogota's 7 million people. Rising temperatures are causing clouds to condense at higher altitudes. Eventually this so-called "dew point" will miss the mountains altogether, said World Bank climate change specialist in Latin America, Walter Vergara. "We're already seeing a drying up of these mountain lakes and wetlands. We're seeing that the dew point is going up the mountain," he said of the World Bank-funded research at Colombia's Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies. (Reuters, July 20)

Boy, does it ever look like a case of "meet the new boss" in Ethiopia. A front-page story by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times July 22 informs us that the government is blocking food aid to the restive Ogaden region. "Food cannot get in," said Mohammed Diab, the director of the UN World Food Program in Ethiopia. Another anonymous "humanitarian official" said: "It's a starve-out-the-population strategy. If something isn't done on the diplomatic front soon, we're going to have a government-caused famine on our hands." The government says the blockade covers only strategic locations, and is meant to prevent arms from reaching the Ogaden National Liberation Front. The really sick thing is that this is a tactic pioneered by the exiled dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who has been convicted on genocide charges by the current regime. Back during the famines of the 1980s, Mengistu barred food aid from reaching the restive Tigray region (as the Library of Congress Country Studies page on Ethiopia recalls). Now the new (Tigray-dominated) regime is emulating this genocidal stratagem against its own ethnic enemies.

A three-judge panel of US Court of Appeals in Washington DC July 20 ordered the government to turn over virtually all its information on Guantanamo detainees who are challenging their detention, rejecting an effort by the Justice Department to limit disclosures. The ruling opens the way for scores of cases by detainees challenging the actions of Pentagon tribunals that decide whether terror suspects should be held as "enemy combatants." It is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the administration's detention policies that have increased the pressure on the White House to find an alternative to Guantanamo, where about 360 men are now being held.

A very amusing New York Times profile July 21 of Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the former firebrand cleric who is now exiled in Lebanon and barred from returning to his former home of Britain. The man who once praised the 9-11 plotters is now attempting to negotiate a truce in the fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. He says: "I want to support Muslims by saving their blood and their life. My job is to calm the fighting and to open a dialogue." Counterintuitively, he says that it is moderate Muslims who are most at risk of becoming jihadist cannon fodder:

"How come the moderate Muslims, not Omar Bakri, do this?" he demanded. "Because of Sheik Google," he quipped, referring to the use of the Internet to learn Islamic principles.

In a strange case of role-reversal, BBC July 20 takes the more Bush-friendly tack in reporting a new executive order on treatment of detained "terror suspects," writing in the lead that it bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," while the headline states: "Bush bans terror suspect torture." Not until six paragraphs down do we get the requisite caveats from rights observers—and then in a quote from another news agency. Leonard Rubenstein, director of Physicians for Human Rights, told AP (BBC says): "What is needed now is repudiation of brutal and cruel interrogation methods. General statements like this are inadequate, particularly after years of evidence that torture was authorised at the highest levels and utilised by US forces." Meanwhile, the establishmentarian New York Times headline on the story reads "C.I.A. Allowed to Resume Interrogations," and the lead states: "After months of behind the scenes wrangling, the White House said Friday that it had given the Central Intelligence Agency approval to resume its use of some harsh interrogation methods in questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas." Gee, doesn't sound so good after all, does it? Is the BBC still so shaken over the scandal following the 2003 Hutton Report that they are determined to be more Catholic than the Pope?

In a surprise ruling July 20, Pakistan's Supreme Court dealt a harsh blow to President Pervez Musharraf, voting unanimously to restore Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry to his post. The court also voted 10-3 to dismiss charges of misconduct that Musharraf filed against Chaudhry. (AP, July 20) The ruling comes amid a nationwide wave of terror. One day earlier, three suicide attacks left scores dead across Pakistan. In the deadliest attack, 14, many army recruits, died in a blast at a military mosque in the northwest garrison town of Kohat. Seven police officers and 22 bystanders were killed in Hub, near Karachi, in a car bomb attack on a police vehicle protecting a convoy of Chinese mining company workers. Another car bomber detonated his payload when guards prevented him from entering the police academy in Hangu, about 70 kilometers southwest of Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province. (NYT, National Post, July 20)